"initial focus" etc
Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2013 8:02 pm
Dear Sirs,
It took me all of twenty minutes just to find out how to send you feedback and bug reports on your program. Your home page did not offer any direct links, but rather took me to the Echo page, the Transifex page, and made me jump through loops and hoops and forum registration, just to give you a little "feedback" and bug reports. If I did not know better I would guess that you did not want any feedback.
I recommend putting a direct link on your home page, as the feedback from customers will help you to improve your product, at no cost to you.
In fact, if it had not taken me so long, I might have separated my bug reports from the suggestions, but, instead, I will just leave it all here together, with my apologies.
Anyway...
Thank you very much for allowing me the use of the free version of CintaNotes 2.3. I had been using NotesHolder for two years, not knowing that CintaNotes was a better solution to the same problem, and had already worked out the few bugs to be found in NotesHolder. The two programs were so similar that I assumed that they were two versions of the same program, made by the same programmers. Now, however, it seems, rather that one must have been inspired by the other. Anyway, upon investigating the features, yours seems to be much, much better,.
FEEDBACK
I suppose that my only disappointment was to see that CintaNotes did not offer the auto-hide feature found in NotesHolder; of AUTOMATICALLY minimizing to the system tray notification area once the user clicked outside the CN window; in other words, CN must be closed or minimized manually, as it cannot do so automatically. (Although I must admit that sometimes I want the window to stay open. Nevertheless, this could be an option in a future revision.)
(You may wish also to check out the red-line feature in NotesHolder, by which the window collapses into a red line permanently attached to the edge of the screen, with the option either of opening the window by merely hovering over the line, or else by double-clicking the line to avoid unintentional launching)
While the colors in your interface matter very little to me, it is interesting to see that on my Vista PC the colors hardly change at all; the "red" option is actually a pale pink; the "green" is not much different from "cyan" and "blue," and, consequently, I see little use for the color option.
Incidentally your help file is also well done. I like the fact that it does not require the user to be connected to the Internet, just to get help.
BUG REPORT
A relatively important issue to me is to keep the individual notes in a manually-arranged order; there are certain notes that I modify frequently, which I would like to keep at the top. Nevertheless, after setting and re-setting CN several times, to keep the "sort by" feature to "manual," and the "reverse order" menu item deselected, CN insists on switching back to the default setting regarding this issue. I thought perhaps that my keyboard shortcuts were conflicting, that I was inadvertently resetting the feature from within another program, but no, I hardly use any keyboard shortcuts as it is, besides CTRL+C and CTRL+V, for copying and pasting, SHIFT+ALT, to change my linguistic keyboard layout from Spanish to English, ALT+LEFT ARROW, to turn pages of text in a certain text program that I have, and CTRL+F12, to try your new "clip" feature. Be;yond that, I do not use keyboard shortcuts, as far as I can recall at the moment.
Consequently this seems to be a bug.
I have tried re-booting the computer, starting and re-starting CN without re-booting, and so on, but nothing corrects the problem. Any suggestions will be appreciated, but meanwhile, this certainly detracts from the otherwise excellent layout of the program.
Please let me know if you choose to correct this issue and update the program.
SUGGESTIONS
A suggestion that I have is in regard to the "initial focus." The options include "title" and "text," but that is all. This is frustrating to me, because, when I create a new note, I definitely want the initial focus to be on the title, so that I can create one, but when I am continually updating an existing note, going from one program to CintaNotes, back and forth, I want the inital focus to be on the text. My suggestion, then, is to include a "third" option in the "inital focus" menu: i.e., "title on new note only".
My last suggestion for improvement may possibly be out of the intended scope of your project, but I will share it, nonetheless.
I formerly used an Apple Macintosh, and the older version 7.5 of the OS included a program called "NotePad" (I think it was). The only outstanding feature of this simple program was that it allowed the user to drag and drop any note from the little window, to form an instant, uneditable memo or picture file, in any folder or on the desktop. In other words, if I wanted to include a little "read me" file, in a folder containing a certain document, to remind me that the document should only be viewed by a certain fifteen people in my office, I could have the memo written in my NotePad window, and then "tear" a copy off whenever needed, and drag it to the folder containing the document, and anytime I double-clicked on the memo itself, a tiny text window would open immediately (without having to wait for any text-editing program to open first), with the text of the memo immediately in view, all within a matter of one second. It was not editable text, but the benefit was that one would not have to open yet another text editor, just to view the "read me" file, knowing that this would take another few seconds of time, and, what is worse, that each text editor has its own way of interpreting the text, the formatting, the window size, the tabs, the window-wrapping, etc. Moreover, sometimes the user sets certain types of text files to automatically associate automatically with certain programs (e.g. NotePad++, MetaPad, Write, etc.), which is often desirable, but at other times, not. When clicking on any Apple NotePad text clipping, however, the system itself opened it, (or perhaps an auxiliary file was running in the background, I don't know) and, regardless of whether it was text, a picture, or something else, it opened instantly, and with no surprises.
This whole concept was faster than any other method I have seen to date, for instantly accessing text clippings of mere information with no regard for formatting.
Moreover, while the viewer window was open, I could hit CTRL+C without hightlighting anything, and a copy of the whole clipping was back on the clipboard.
This would be a wonderful addition to CintaNotes.
Anyway, sorry to take your time. I hope my suggestions are useful to you.
Sincerely yours,
ErikJon
It took me all of twenty minutes just to find out how to send you feedback and bug reports on your program. Your home page did not offer any direct links, but rather took me to the Echo page, the Transifex page, and made me jump through loops and hoops and forum registration, just to give you a little "feedback" and bug reports. If I did not know better I would guess that you did not want any feedback.
I recommend putting a direct link on your home page, as the feedback from customers will help you to improve your product, at no cost to you.
In fact, if it had not taken me so long, I might have separated my bug reports from the suggestions, but, instead, I will just leave it all here together, with my apologies.
Anyway...
Thank you very much for allowing me the use of the free version of CintaNotes 2.3. I had been using NotesHolder for two years, not knowing that CintaNotes was a better solution to the same problem, and had already worked out the few bugs to be found in NotesHolder. The two programs were so similar that I assumed that they were two versions of the same program, made by the same programmers. Now, however, it seems, rather that one must have been inspired by the other. Anyway, upon investigating the features, yours seems to be much, much better,.
FEEDBACK
I suppose that my only disappointment was to see that CintaNotes did not offer the auto-hide feature found in NotesHolder; of AUTOMATICALLY minimizing to the system tray notification area once the user clicked outside the CN window; in other words, CN must be closed or minimized manually, as it cannot do so automatically. (Although I must admit that sometimes I want the window to stay open. Nevertheless, this could be an option in a future revision.)
(You may wish also to check out the red-line feature in NotesHolder, by which the window collapses into a red line permanently attached to the edge of the screen, with the option either of opening the window by merely hovering over the line, or else by double-clicking the line to avoid unintentional launching)
While the colors in your interface matter very little to me, it is interesting to see that on my Vista PC the colors hardly change at all; the "red" option is actually a pale pink; the "green" is not much different from "cyan" and "blue," and, consequently, I see little use for the color option.
Incidentally your help file is also well done. I like the fact that it does not require the user to be connected to the Internet, just to get help.
BUG REPORT
A relatively important issue to me is to keep the individual notes in a manually-arranged order; there are certain notes that I modify frequently, which I would like to keep at the top. Nevertheless, after setting and re-setting CN several times, to keep the "sort by" feature to "manual," and the "reverse order" menu item deselected, CN insists on switching back to the default setting regarding this issue. I thought perhaps that my keyboard shortcuts were conflicting, that I was inadvertently resetting the feature from within another program, but no, I hardly use any keyboard shortcuts as it is, besides CTRL+C and CTRL+V, for copying and pasting, SHIFT+ALT, to change my linguistic keyboard layout from Spanish to English, ALT+LEFT ARROW, to turn pages of text in a certain text program that I have, and CTRL+F12, to try your new "clip" feature. Be;yond that, I do not use keyboard shortcuts, as far as I can recall at the moment.
Consequently this seems to be a bug.
I have tried re-booting the computer, starting and re-starting CN without re-booting, and so on, but nothing corrects the problem. Any suggestions will be appreciated, but meanwhile, this certainly detracts from the otherwise excellent layout of the program.
Please let me know if you choose to correct this issue and update the program.
SUGGESTIONS
A suggestion that I have is in regard to the "initial focus." The options include "title" and "text," but that is all. This is frustrating to me, because, when I create a new note, I definitely want the initial focus to be on the title, so that I can create one, but when I am continually updating an existing note, going from one program to CintaNotes, back and forth, I want the inital focus to be on the text. My suggestion, then, is to include a "third" option in the "inital focus" menu: i.e., "title on new note only".
My last suggestion for improvement may possibly be out of the intended scope of your project, but I will share it, nonetheless.
I formerly used an Apple Macintosh, and the older version 7.5 of the OS included a program called "NotePad" (I think it was). The only outstanding feature of this simple program was that it allowed the user to drag and drop any note from the little window, to form an instant, uneditable memo or picture file, in any folder or on the desktop. In other words, if I wanted to include a little "read me" file, in a folder containing a certain document, to remind me that the document should only be viewed by a certain fifteen people in my office, I could have the memo written in my NotePad window, and then "tear" a copy off whenever needed, and drag it to the folder containing the document, and anytime I double-clicked on the memo itself, a tiny text window would open immediately (without having to wait for any text-editing program to open first), with the text of the memo immediately in view, all within a matter of one second. It was not editable text, but the benefit was that one would not have to open yet another text editor, just to view the "read me" file, knowing that this would take another few seconds of time, and, what is worse, that each text editor has its own way of interpreting the text, the formatting, the window size, the tabs, the window-wrapping, etc. Moreover, sometimes the user sets certain types of text files to automatically associate automatically with certain programs (e.g. NotePad++, MetaPad, Write, etc.), which is often desirable, but at other times, not. When clicking on any Apple NotePad text clipping, however, the system itself opened it, (or perhaps an auxiliary file was running in the background, I don't know) and, regardless of whether it was text, a picture, or something else, it opened instantly, and with no surprises.
This whole concept was faster than any other method I have seen to date, for instantly accessing text clippings of mere information with no regard for formatting.
Moreover, while the viewer window was open, I could hit CTRL+C without hightlighting anything, and a copy of the whole clipping was back on the clipboard.
This would be a wonderful addition to CintaNotes.
Anyway, sorry to take your time. I hope my suggestions are useful to you.
Sincerely yours,
ErikJon